Stuff that gets you through the night...

Sometimes a kind word or fitting wavelength is all you need to get up and go on. Herein lie sketches on worthy things that may reach you in some random way. I'll never know their effect on you. I only know, it is for you, that I write them.

I had a bagful of fountain flowers from when I fell into the sleep of sleeps. A bagpiper passed me by and asked me for a dirge, so I sang him one, bid him good day, and pulled out a flower on display, but he ran away before I could slip it into his repertoire.

A girl of twenty showed me her lips because I refused to kiss her on her hips, and when that, too, I denied, she pulled all the petals of all my flowers and threw the stems on my face.

I said, "Thank you for this scorn and destruction - now I'll have to return to the fountain and bring you new blooms for the plucking.

The bagpiper had grown old and weary upon my return with the second bagful of fountain flowers. He asked me for a song of birth. I sang him one, bid him goodnight, and pulled out a flower for his pleasure. He stumbled toward me to grasp it from my hand, but dropped to the ground like a dead bird from the timber.

The girl all grey and seething with feud required that I be subdued and demanded the bagful of flowers. I flung them into the air and went back to the fountain where Nemesis, at the behest of Echo’s accusal, never fails to hand me daffodils. She hopes that I'll stare into the pool and become a fool like Narcissus.

Pipers, maidens, witches and goddesses, they come to my table at night. But with each failed purpose they count their hours, for their deaths must follow dawn.

The drills, the drills, in feather-land, dug in their heels to build inroads in abyssal rock. Trains went through, and sewer pipes, and the people in castles and carriages of covinous motion in a snarl-up.

The decibels grated eardrums into powder, and the lightless moist dust inset like calcified arteries; a stark-staring miscue. Ossified feathers are not stone.

There's no light in dreams born underground, no sound when they crumble. The sun will shine for billions more, while you in the dark, stumble.

I know my place in this world by your being out of place in it. What I set right, you overturn again and again and consume me in your drawing of drawers and tossing of socks and pencils and books and the five-dollar Baroque vase that you added to the trolley at the thrift store.

No point saving an unreal holder. You smash an order to make another and remind the world it is a version.

What a mess you leave in your wake. I do not yet know that I'm happiest when I toss in your waves and forget the stiff earth beneath my feet.

I hover over you as you hover like a helicopter with paper blades, crunching and smacking and making sucking sounds in the predictable air.

Writing is a voyage of the heart; a process by which the man of the world walks in the ways of the inner man. While it may be useful to analyze why a writer wrote a particular story, by reading his letters, listening to what he says about his friends and foes, or by finding out how he conducted himself in his personal life or how he got on with his mother or whether he believed in God, and so on, we mustn't forget that beneath the act of creation lies a mystery. Interpretations speak volumes of the interpreter but say very little about the author. If the author has tried his best to be truthful in his fiction, he will know that the way a story unfolds is hidden even from him. While his mind and body are engaged in setting down what he wants to say, something else that is not just him but some larger reality that contains him, decides what eventually ends up on the page. That somethingelse is like the breath of life - the writer does not know where it comes from, but he knows he must breathe.

Someone once told me this world is another world's hell, that the creator made this world and forgot about it. The countless crimes that are ravaging the human body and soul, even as these words find their mark, seem to drive in that rusty knife of an impression. It seems like the world suddenly turned upside down, that somehow, the rules of truth and goodness don't apply anymore. Maybe that's why we tell stories; to know ourselves, understand why we do the things we do, find some kind of light that will dispel the shadows, and, inform us once and for all, that they were only shadows. I knew my first book would start with a Creation Story, about thirty years before I wrote it. Whether it was seeing the tattered, illustrated book of Genesis sitting beside the equally and severely thumbed The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex by Charles Darwin, that sowed the first seed, I cannot tell. What I can tell, though, is that I wrote it to see if by the end of the effort I might not be able to catch, from the centre of the black hole of a spinning dying star, the infinitely blue-shifted light of the universe. The Bending of Strong Forms is a glimpse of that blue-shifted light.

I was twelve when the BFG visited me in the form of a British lady who read us stories in the air-conditioned school library with tender lights. A giant walked around at night blowing dreams into children's ears, she said, and just like that, sent a dream into my head. And the dream had ready company, for my head was filled with incomplete stories that my father used to start and then doze off at the crucial point, telling me, before shutting his eyes, "Son, you'll finish that story, won't you?" My father died when I was seventeen and I write stories and I know now, who my BFG is - he gives me dreams to make good, and he has my father's face.